Wales’ 20,000 social rent target will ‘be touch and go, but we’ll still make it’ – minister

Ms James is speaking to Inside Housing in the Welsh government’s office buildings in Cathays Park, north of Cardiff’s city centre. We’re in the room next door to where first minister Mark Drakeford held his COVID-19 briefings at a podium flanked by two Welsh flags.

“It’s an ambitious target. When we started, it was in 2021, of course, in the middle of the pandemic, and we honestly thought the pandemic was going to be the worst of our troubles. Actually, it hasn’t been,” Ms James says, citing supply chain shortages, cost of living increases and inflationary pressures.

“We think that we’re kind of hanging on to it by the skin of our teeth,” she reiterates, echoing phrasing she has used before.

“I’m not prepared to lower it, because once we do that, I’m a bit afraid that all of our registered social landlords and stockholding councils will go…” she mimics breathing a sigh of relief. “I don’t want them to do that.”

Will she get behind Inside Housing’s Build Social campaign, which is calling for political parties to commit to an annual target of 4,000 social rent homes a year in Wales over the next decade?

“I absolutely support the campaign,” she says, but cautions that the government has purposefully not set an annual target.

She says: “It’s really hard to meet an annual target. You need to look at how long it takes to get from the idea of the house to the house.”

Ms James says the government has done a lot of work on “the planning system, the supply chain and the construction industry”.

“You can’t just snap your fingers and build houses, with the best will in the world and wanting to build as many as possible. You have to have a ready workforce, the ability to skill them up, the supply chain in place, the land, the utilities – the actual house is the least of it,” she says.

Not all the 20,000 of her government’s target will be new builds. Some will be empty homes brought back into use, she adds.

“We work right down to individual site level with our local authority planning authorities to understand what’s in planning at the moment and whether there are enough houses, because if they’re not in planning now, we won’t get them built,” she says.

Because of this, the current development trajectory is “OK”, she says. “We would expect it to start slowly and build up at the end.”

Rethinking approaches to homelessness

But the need for new social homes is only getting more severe. The levels of homelessness in Wales are “growing, not declining”, Ms James says, with record numbers of people seeking help from homelessness services.

The Welsh government’s most recent figures show 11,692 people were being housed in temporary accommodation at the end of March 2024. More than 3,700 are housed in B&Bs and hotels.

An extensive piece of legislation is due to change Wales’ approach. A white paper on ending homelessness in the country was published in November 2023, with a bill set to be introduced into the Senedd in February 2025.

The proposals put forward are rooted in consultation with people with lived experience of homelessness and aim to switch the focus more to earlier interventions in the causes.

“We’ve been trying to move the budget from the sharp-end side to the preventative side. The analogy everyone uses is to try and turn the tap off, because at the moment, we’re filling a sink with the plug out,” Ms James says.

Wales is scrapping tests applied by local authorities to assess people on the basis of “priority need”, whether a person is “intentionally homeless” and if they have a local connection to the area.

The aim, the government says, is to make sure homelessness is rare, brief and unrepeated, enable rapid rehousing, and make preventing homelessness the responsibility of the entire Welsh public service.

In Cardiff alone, there are currently over 8,000 people on the housing waiting list and hundreds being housed in B&Bs or hotels. Waiting lists for temporary accommodation in Cardiff have leapt by 150% since 2021, despite more housing being made available.

In December 2023, Cardiff Council’s cabinet declared a housing emergency in the city due to “unprecedented pressures” on homelessness services.

One solution the city is trying out, is to take advantage of the ‘meanwhile’ use of a vacant site to bring in modular homes for temporary accommodation. This model uses permitted development rights, which means a project does not require planning permission and work can start far sooner.

One site is on the former gasworks in Grangetown, a district in the south of the city. In sight of IKEA and the delicate gas holder that gives the site its name, the 155 modular homes are all built to zero-carbon, Passivhaus standards, with photovoltaic panels and air source heat pumps.

Crucially, the homes are demountable, meaning that one day they could be moved to a permanent location. The Gasworks site will later have around 500 permanent mixed-tenure homes.

“It slightly sounds like we’ve put people in a shed, but they aren’t at all. They’re really very nice,” Ms James says. “I think that’s been quite a game-changer, but we still want to get them into their forever homes.”

Despite the issues clouding the use of modern methods of construction, Cardiff Council hopes to roll even more modular homes via vacant development sites, funded in part by the Welsh government’s Transitional Accommodation Capital Funding Programme for the modular homes.

At the end of May, the cabinet approved recommendations to buy two commercial properties to be converted for residential use to deliver 99 new homes. A nearby vacant site would allow it to “rapidly expand” the modular homes programme “to create around 150 homes for temporary or long-term family accommodation”.

As yet, though, hotels remain necessary and their use as temporary accommodation was approved for another 12 months.

“We’ve done quite a bit of work around Wales on attitudes to social housing,” Ms James adds.

“Most people immediately tell you that they don’t want social housing near their home. But once you dig below that a little bit, it’s because they don’t think they’ll ever get it,” she explains, because the demand is so high.

“As soon as you talk to them about having other allocation policies, like local connections, local work, people have a very different attitude to it.”